


How to Sing a Song Worth Saving

by muurmuur



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: And a happy ending, Angst and Tragedy and Fluff and Angst and Romance and Angst, Azure Moon Route, M/M, Mental Instability, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, Pre-Game to Post-War, Tragedy of Duscur (Fire Emblem), Vignettes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:07:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26736361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muurmuur/pseuds/muurmuur
Summary: Memories of the Savior King, and the man who saved him.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Dedue Molinaro
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	How to Sing a Song Worth Saving

_**1175.** _

Dimitri is thirteen years old. Fhirdiad is full of flowers. The palace is dripping with them: fragrant lilies, roses, hydrangea, even sunflowers from Leicester. He wakes feeling as though he’s swimming in a courtier’s perfume bottle. It doesn’t seem so proper. Thirteen, he is, today, finally, after twelve long and boyish years. Father says that thirteen makes him a man. He wonders if they should’ve strung the capital with daggers and arrows instead of garlands. Certainly Felix would have preferred such an arrangement. Dimitri smiles at that. His reflection smiles back at him, half-hidden by the busy arms of his attendants as they dress him in his birthday attire.

Ingrid won’t admit it, Dimitri thinks to himself, but she’ll like the flowers. Maybe Glenn will pluck a rose and tuck it behind her ear. A tiny prick of hot jealousy sneaks into his gut. It wouldn’t be so terrible to have someone to whom he could give a flower. Then again, doing something like that on such an auspicious day would be tantamount to a proposal, he supposes, which seems a thing a bit too grand for him to settle on just quite yet.

In any case, he imagines that Father and Lady Patricia have been long at work already considering his potential match. No doubt the first batch of them will be waiting for him in a neat queue during this evening’s ball. He imagines their gowns, the glitter of their jewelry, the pretty lace of their gloves. It gives him a stomachache, just like the ones he has after the cooks spoil him with too many slices of iced cake.

One of the attendants bows. They’ve finished with their work.

“Thank you,” Dimitri says. The rest of the retinue bows as well. He wishes that they wouldn’t. Lady Patricia has explained the importance of these sorts of things to him, but what he would give to occasionally be granted the opportunity to dress himself. Not that he’d likely manage the buttons, he concedes upon further inspection, dizzied by the intricacy in their handsome double stripe down the center of his chest.

“His Majesty, the King and the Lady Patricia await you in the solar,” one of the attendants— the eldest, Henri, more of a doting old uncle than a servant, really, and certainly more than Uncle Rufus— announces. His eyes crinkle with a smile. “I suspect that they might have a gift for you, although you haven’t heard such a thing from me.”

Dimitri grins before quickly smoothing his lips into a more proper line. He’s not a little boy anymore. He shouldn’t be giggling about presents. Not that he isn’t excited to see what it could possibly be. _A sword_ , he wonders first, thinking about Felix again. He can only imagine the theatrics that the youngest Fraldarius will pull in an attempt to hide his jealousy. _Or a horse_ , he considers next, the heels of his boots clacking against the floorboards as he strides from his quarters into the hall. If it is, maybe Sylvain can help him with it. There’d be more fun in that than allowing the stable master to take on the task alone. The margrave certainly doesn’t allow the same coddling in the Gautier holdfast that is so ubiquitous in Fhirdiad. If Dimitri isn’t careful, Sylvain will trounce him in the tourneys forevermore.

Dimitri skips up the final three stairs leading into the sunny solar. The room is sunken, overseen by the platform on which he’s found himself. Below, his father and Lady Patricia have seated themselves on a pair of twin bergères. Birthday or otherwise, their morning reading appears unchanged from the usual assortment of missives and reports. The king has a long scroll splayed open with one hand, cocked crookedly as he examines a midway section with a smirk. His other hand is slung over his chair to rest on Lady Patricia’s forearm. The signet ring on his finger glimmers in the sunlight as he idly traces a circle against her sleeve.

Dimitri listens in as Lady Patricia suddenly laughs. She tilts her book towards the king, murmuring as she reads a passage aloud. His father laughs as well, shaking his head at whatever farce she’s shared. He tosses the scroll aside afterwards, slumping lower in his chair as he stretches his freed arm and rubs at the back of his neck. There is nothing kingly about him in that moment. He is simply a man enjoying a joke with his beloved; a father awaiting the arrival of his son to celebrate the day of his birth, in the middle of a sunny morning sweetened by the scent of fresh-cut flowers.

Dimitri’s chest swells. He feels like he’s just swallowed his weight in mulled wine. Maybe it won’t be so terrible to be a man. Not so frightening, not even to be a king. One day surely he will sit in the solar himself, just like his father now, draped with love and flowers. What a gift it is. What a gift it will be.

* * *

_**1176.** _

Dedue’s father is dead. He’s seen it himself: the act, the aftermath. None of it seems real. It can’t be possible. His father isn’t simply a man. His hands have pulled red-hot metal from the forge and shaped the world. The nails that had built the schoolhouse. The hammers that had driven them in. The pretty legs of the desks, each intricate, each unique. Flowers, filigrees, romping hares all cast in steel. There’s life in what he makes. He’s a god. How can he possibly be _dead_?

And his mother— her voice, soft, melodic; her soothing hands— his _sister_ , just a child. They’d left their bodies in the market. He was supposed to be next. A boy, fifteen. His father’s apprentice, often mocked, because he looks like his father but is his mother’s son. _Shy_ , the elders had always chided the others. _He’s just shy. Be kind_. Now they were all just broken bodies left unburied in the market. His had been the last. He’d wanted to fight it, but the fires had petrified him. That’s ironic, isn’t it? Even if he’d been born for it, he’d never really wanted for the forge.

“Are you thirsty?”

Dedue looks up from his hunched cower, hands slipping free from his brow as he straightens to face the boy sitting on the bench opposite him in the carriage. His savior. The boy looks the part, or had, at least. He is golden haired and comely. His jacket is finely made. He sits with a proper posture, even when the carriage jerks and lurches. One of his eyes is blackened and swollen shut. The left sleeve of his jacket has torn at the shoulder. The navy fabric is dusted with ash. The soldier who’d found them first had knelt before him and wiped blood from his face until it had turned his rag black.

The boy had beaten four men to death with an old helmet swung like a cudgel. Dedue’s would-be executioners had fallen at his feet. The men who’d killed his father, his mother, his sister; the baker, the schoolmaster, the priest. The boy has saved him and avenged him. Now he asks him if he wishes for a drink. Dedue can feel debt gripping him with icy fingers.

“Yes,” he admits hoarsely. The boy’s lips tremble. He turns to snatch a skin of water from the bench beside him and offers it to Dedue. Dedue takes the skin and turns it between his hands. It’s heavy. Makes his mouth water. The boy sniffles.

“Please. Drink.”

Dedue wonders if it matters if the water is poisoned. He uncorks it and takes a drink. This too is an arrangement. He feels himself losing ground.

“My name is Dimitri,” the boy says.

 _I know who you are_ , Dedue thinks. He’d seen the griffon sewn on his father’s killer’s chest. None of it makes sense. Duscur had done nothing to deserve Faerghus’ wrath. How had the southern kingdom’s prince found his way into Dedue’s humble town? Why had he run into the ruined market, and for what godsforsaken reason had he killed the men who wore his colors when he’d found them tearing it down? Everything is wrong. Dedue feels like someone has taken one of his mother’s books and ripped the pages from the spine to arrange them out of order, end to beginning, upside down.

“And yours?”

Dedue wants to take his father’s hammer and smash the carriage apart. The velvet curtains, the lacquered wood. He wants to grip Dimitri’s once-pretty face between his hands and watch as his skin turns purple. He wants to scream until he’s ripped the sound from his voice. He wants to cry. He wants to be touched. He wants to disappear.

“I’m sorry,” Dimitri whispers hoarsely. Dedue finds himself staring at him. For a moment it seems as if there is nothing else in the world but the prince himself. What little light there is in the carriage is sucked into the pearl of his skin. It glimmers in the tears brimming his eyes. Dedue shudders. The king of Faerghus is dead and here, nearly alone in the craggy wilderness of Duscur, his son weeps for someone else.

“I... We pray,” Dimitri continues, still watching as Dedue watches him, tears drawing lines down his sooty cheeks, “for those who’ve left us. We speak their names, so that they are not forgotten. Would you allow me to pray for...?”

 _For everyone_ , perhaps he finds it so difficult to say. Dedue feels as though he’s toppled into an endless hole. Everyone. They’re all gone, and perhaps not just in his village alone. Is he the last of them? How can the weeping princeling possibly hope to name them all? How can he think that they won’t all be forgotten? 

He grits his jaw so tight that he can hear the thrum of his heartbeat in the clench of his teeth.

“...Teodoro. Flora. Isadora,” his voice cracks. Father. Mother. Sister. Dedue names the rest of them as well. He swallows the rest of the water to do it, and even then his voice rasps when he finishes with the last few babes in swaddling who must be remembered by surnames alone. The carriage is dark save for a single candle balanced precariously in a dish on the prince’s lap. The lids of Dedue’s eyes feel impossibly heavy. He lets his head slump against the top edge of the bench. Even as he drifts off, exhausted, he can hear the prince whispering the names: again, again, again.

* * *

_**1178.** _

“Dedue.”

A whisper from behind his door, followed after by a knock. Dedue startles, setting his book aside as he stands from his desk. Most would not bother with knocking at his door. He draws himself up into his height and smooths the wrinkles from his tunic. He has learned that the way he stands and the way he speaks is of paramount importance in Faerghus. If he does either poorly, he gives the kingdom’s people another weapon to wield against him. He no longer finds these weapons frightening, nor even terribly strange, but neither does he wish to be threatened. But if his visitor has come, and knocked, and now waits patiently for his answer, that also means that they may come unarmed, and so Dedue supposes that in this rare instance they deserve a proper welcome.

He opens the door and finds that he is right. Henri, one of Dimitri’s oldest and most loyal servants, stands waiting for him, skeletal in the shadows thrown by the candlestick gripped in one of his knobby hands. 

“Is His Highness unwell?”

Henri frowns. “I fear that His Highness has suffered from a nightmare,” he whispers, eyes darting furtively down the dark hall. Even his coming to Dedue’s humble room is an illicit affair. The palace mages, prideful creatures under Lord Regent Rufus’ command, demand that Dimitri’s strange fits be treated with sour-smelling potions that leave him listless and foggy-eyed for days. Only the last few members of King Lambert’s old guard prefer to see to it differently. Luckily for Dedue, they are also the men and women most familiar with all of the palace’s secrets and hidden corridors.

“I will go to him,” Dedue answers. He shuts his door behind him without a second glance. Henri nods and turns to lead him away. They walk quickly, quietly, grimly, as if they are the palace’s last defenders briskly advancing to look upon an approaching siege. Dedue supposes that they are, really, or at least in the ways that matter. His footsteps crunch as they come upon Dimitri’s door. He frowns. Henri reads him well.

“His grace has taken to throwing things,” Henri sighs. He eyes the door warily. “Be cautious, Dedue.”

“His Highness will not hurt me.”

Dedue reaches for the door. The grand room inside is lightless. He struggles to see, blinded by the loss of Henri’s dim candlelight. He listens carefully while he gropes deeper into the room. Harried, rasping breaths. More crunching glass. _Thud._ _Thud. Thud._

“Your Highness,” Dedue attempts, forcing his voice stern despite the unease shivering through his chest. He hears a sharp inhale.

“Dedue.”

 _Thud. Thud._ Dedue steps two paces more. His eyes have begun to adjust to the dark. He spots a crumpled figure wedged into a corner at the far end of the room. A path of glittering, broken things lays ready to lead him there. The moonlight catches in them. He glances to the windows and sees that their rich drapery has been ripped from the rods.

“Dedue,” Dimitri moans. “I saw. I saw it. A man with a dagger, dressed in black. That night, Dedue, I _saw_ him. If only I had told Father.” He sobs. _Thud. Thud_. “If only I had said the words. He was a warrior. He would have _stopped_ him. If I had just _warned_ him.”

Dedue steps closer and sucks in a groan. Dimitri, cowered awkwardly into the corner, is an animal caught in a trap. Flecks of broken plaster cover the floor around him. Dedue stiffens as he watches Dimitri lurch slightly backwards to smash his fists against the cratered mess of the wall. The thick stone of the palace’s skeleton seems to be the only thing fit to withstand the prince’s terrifying strength.

Dedue isn’t keen to confirm the theory. He leaps forward to wrench Dimitri away from the corner. Dimitri struggles against him as Dedue reaches under his arms and locks his own in a tight cross against his chest. Sharp, broken things bite through the knees of Dedue’s trousers.

“I saw it,” Dimitri stammers, “I saw it. I saw it. Dedue. I saw, I saw, I _saw_.”

Dedue has learned that Dimitri’s fits cannot be solved with logic. _You were asleep,_ he could argue, _asleep in a carriage, and only roused when it’d been wrecked and spilled you out into the mud. You saw nothing until it was already done._ Dimitri had told him the same two years before, and that time calmly, in the voice that Dedue has learned to trust. Whatever stories he’s telling now about secret assassins are simply cruel fairytales whispered to him by the night.

Dedue forces Dimitri to his feet. Not for the first time, he is thankful for his family’s stolen legacy. Dimitri is ferociously strong, but Dedue is a blacksmith’s son. If he can twist steel, he can force Dimitri into the soft protection of his bed. They stagger together drunkenly. Once he feels the knock of the bedframe against his shin, Dedue turns and tosses Dimitri to the mattress. Dimitri flails like a wildcat to find his footing again. Dedue holds him fast by the shoulders until he begins to flag.

“Breathe,” he orders. He can see the whites of Dimitri’s eyes in the gloom. “Tell me what you see.”

“Fire,” Dimitri gasps. Dedue grips him tighter.

“There is no fire here. Look. Tell me.”

He listens as Dimitri struggles to catch his breath. It slows from a rapid, bestial huff through his nose into deliberate gulps. His shoulders tremor.

“Darkness.”

“Look closer.”

“The moon,” Dimitri whispers finally. His head sags against the mattress. “The canopy above my bed.”

“Good. Go on.”

“You.” Dimitri’s voice cracks. Dedue feels like he’s been doused with ice water. He ignores the kick inside his chest while he slowly loosens his grip.

“I will light the lamp at your bedside,” he tells Dimitri, each syllable slow and testing. He waits until Dimitri nods before he gingerly rises from the bed. He walks like a hunter, pivoting on his heel to keep Dimitri in his field of vision even as he slips the small square of flint from his pocket and sparks the lamp alight. He winces as he adjusts the wick, giving the room just enough light for him to make his inspection.

“What is the hour?” Dimitri asks timidly. Dedue knows this game as well. He means to distract him. He frowns and looks to find whatever it is that Dimitri wishes to distract him from. His stomach sinks when he spots his hands, which the prince has done his desperate best to hide beneath the sheets.

“I am not certain,” Dedue answers honestly. He sits at the edge of the bed and holds out his hand expectantly. Dimitri seems to shrink against the bedsheets. He dares not meet his eyes.

“I have woken you,” Dimitri mutters glumly.

“You have not.” Dedue flexes his hand. Dimitri slowly unveils his own and offers them forward dejectedly. Dedue fights the urge to flinch as he looks over his bloodied knuckles. He’s beaten them flat against the walls. It isn’t the first time. His skin is already scarred, the bones crooked and off-kilter. Dedue fears that soon he will struggle to grip a pen. He knows that Dimitri’s minders worry far more about his ability to swing a lance.

“Henri has fetched you,” Dimitri guesses. Dedue nods and turns to hunt through a bedside set of drawers. He uses his free hand to collect a roll of gauze and a glass bottle filled with witch hazel oil. He releases Dimitri for a moment to tear away a square of the former before wetting it with the oil. Dimitri waits obediently and offers him his hands again when he gestures for them. He hisses as Dedue gently dabs at his split skin. Dedue is grateful for it: for a sign that he feels, that he is a part of the world with him instead of the one he’s invented for himself, built from bitter self loathing and ire.

“I am too great a burden on you both.”

“Impossible,” Dedue chides. He soothes over one hand and then the next. A nostalgic part of him wishes to bow forward and press his lips to Dimitri’s swollen skin, but he knows better than to try. “You are no burden.”

Dimitri laughs ruefully. “I fear I am the definition.”

“Forgive me, Your Highness, but you are incorrect.” Dedue sets aside the bottle and begins to carefully unwind the roll of gauze around Dimitri’s left hand. Next, the right. Dimitri’s grip tightens around him when he finishes with the second.

“Please,” he begs him, barely a whisper, his eyes downcast and hidden beneath his lashes, “don’t leave.”

Dedue swallows around the sudden tightness in his throat. “Of course not, Your Highness.”

Dimitri nods and turns away. Dedue rises to store his humble healer’s kit. Next he minces carefully over the flotsam strewn across the room to creak open the door. Henri jumps from his tired lean against the opposite wall and dashes forward to peek at him through the crack. They share an unspoken agreement. Henri’s eyes flood with relief. He nods, and then tips his head deferentially before shielding the flicker of his candle to finally turn and hunt out his own bed. Dedue pulls the door closed and locks the bolt tight.

He retraces his steps towards Dimitri. The prince has shifted deeper into the center of the bed to make a space for him at his side. Dedue steps out of his boots. He doesn’t bother with snuffing out the lamp. Dimitri sleeps better with a light, and Dedue will need it when he makes his early morning escape. The palace has come to tolerate Dimitri’s outbursts, but they will not weather the impropriety of his sharing a bed, especially not with a man, and especially not if that man is Dedue.

Not that Dedue gives a damn about any of that. He understands the game that Dimitri must play, however, and has agreed, however implicitly, to help him play it. He sits and gently settles himself on the bed. Dimitri turns to cower towards him like a moth fluttering to a flame. By instinct, Dedue’s arm snakes under his neck to settle on his shoulder. Dimitri cuddles into the protective swoop of his embrace. He trembles for a few moments longer before he finally stills and slowly drifts off to sleep.

Dedue stares into the canopy bridged over Dimitri’s bed. A griffon is carved into the wood. It prances proudly through curlicue clouds. He wonders if Dimitri dreamed about griffons when he’d been a boy in that same bed. As he does he carefully drains the evening’s tension into the dam inside his chest. His eyes water with the effort. _Think about dreams_ , he coaches himself, just like he coaches Dimitri, but all he can picture is swirling, black tides and Dimitri’s bloodied hands.

The dam will break, he knows. Already it seethes against him, making his ribcage creak like a schooner caught in a storm. Someday it will break. He is certain, both suddenly and irreversibly, that when that day comes, he will drown if it means that he can keep Dimitri’s head above water. Somehow that settles him. Gives him purpose. Throws some meager form of meaning into the relentless chaos that has made a mockery of his past life. He closes his eyes, draws in a shaky breath, and forces himself to sleep. 

* * *

_**1180.** _

All men have secrets. Dimitri understands this notion both logically and instinctually. It is impossible, firstly, to be entirely frank with anyone. Moreover, spilled truths better kept unsaid put one at a disadvantage. He has learned well enough that their world is not kind to the disadvantaged. It stands to reason, therefore, that all of his peers have secrets, too.

There are some among them who are also eager to uncover them. He sees this best in Duke Riegan’s heir, but all of them harbor some breed of curiosity. Dimitri is not unused to it. Plenty of people have watched him with a curious eye. No doubt it is their obligation to test his mettle. He does not mind it insomuch as it makes him terribly uneasy, and at an unimaginable scale now that he has more parts of himself that he must hide.

But if Dimitri were to have a secret-keeper, not everything that he would whisper to them would be unkind. He cherishes these little truths. They are proof that he is not entirely a monster. Chief among them, buried deepest in his chest, is that he loves to watch Dedue. Dimitri knows what this must mean, of course, much in the same way that he understands why he’s always been drawn to him. But that is a secret that is so inconceivably complex that he hasn’t yet mustered the nerve to inspect it himself. He focuses on the lesser parts. They are bright stars in his endless nights.

His favorite constellations:

I. When stood at attention, Dedue often crosses his arms. As stern and solemn as he looks, Dimitri has learned that he taps his fingers against his sleeves while he stands guard. It’s never to a four-quarter beat, but instead always to its own flourish. He’s singing, Dimitri has realized. Not out loud, of course, but rather keeping time to something orchestrated for his own ear alone. Dimitri wonders if they are simply idle tunes improvised for the moment, or memories from fonder times. He wishes he could hear them, too.

II. Once, during a particularly dry lecture on archery, Dedue drifted off to sleep while sitting at his desk. His head had bobbed forward and lulled from side to side. A sunbeam had been slanted just right from the nearby window to stripe across his face. It had caught in his pale lashes, casting inky shadows below them and illuminating them silver-spun above. Dimitri remembers nothing else from the lesson. Perhaps he will be killed by bow. It matters little to him. Greater men have died for the sublime.

III. Most precious, a memory of Dedue in the greenhouse. It is late afternoon. The rest of the monastery has retreated to cool, shadowed rooms. The greenhouse is hot, humid, verdant. Dedue is crouched between a pair of planters far from central view. He comes here in his rare moments alone, Dimitri knows. There is evidence of his visits everywhere: fragile, beautiful flowers unlike anything else Dimitri has ever seen. It is an invasion for him to have followed Dedue, and yet he cannot look away. Dedue caresses the flowers like a lover. He is a dryad, Dimitri thinks, breathless. He is the earth.

* * *

_**1180.** _

Dimitri has cast him off.

This is an exaggeration, of course. He has simply instructed Dedue to enjoy the ball. _No one will hurt me here,_ he had insisted that afternoon. _And if they mean to do it, they will face Felix first. He will be in a dangerous mood to be forced into dress uniform. No harm will come to me tonight._

Dedue understands that Dimitri is attempting to be magnanimous. He also understands that it most likely has to do with the endless flock of women who have been looking shyly in Dimitri’s direction ever since the ball had first been announced. It seems treasonous to scare them off as the ever-present grim shadow at Dimitri’s heels. Surely Dimitri will eventually require a queen. Dedue understand enough of Fodlani politics to be certain of that, just as he is certain that Garreg Mach is as fertile a ground to find such a match as anywhere else.

So he has been cast off, and finds himself now eerily alone. He tries to name the sharpness in his chest: guilt, at having his services so easily replaced; idleness, for having found himself suddenly without charge; discomfort, as he is once again tossed into the midst of unfamiliar etiquette and foreign affairs.

It is far simpler than any of that, of course. He is not like Dimitri. His psyche has not been shattered into dangerous, capricious pieces. He is simply jealous. Hurt to have been cast aside. Like a fool. A whimpering child. He suffers through three waltzes in the ballroom before he makes his escape to lick his wounds outside. Although he means to make his way to the greenhouse, he is lured instead into the shadow of the Goddess Tower.

He eyes it warily on his approach. His people have goddesses as well. Some of them are kind and gracious, and some of them are not. He hasn’t yet decided into which camp the goddess Sothis falls. Will her tower simply be filled with mockery as well? Coupled students, giggling, groping, gasping without care? Is it so pitiful that he finds himself jealous of them? Is it wrong for him to long for a life lost and left unburied so far away?

He’d been old enough even then—before—to understanding longing. Memories of it descend on him as he slowly summits the tower stairs. His first love had been Luciano, the schoolmaster’s son. Dedue had always been quiet, but when Luciano had deigned to even look at him, he’d find himself mute, and deaf, and dumb. The girls all giggled when it happened, but Luciano had always been gracious. Once he’d even left a book of poetry at Dedue’s desk for him to find, thumb-marked with little scraps of paper marking the pieces he admired most.

Dedue had read them all thrice over before his mother had caught on. Afterwards she’d hummed and laughed and chased him into a hug, crooning about love while chiding him to remember that he was still young. Afterwards, despite all of his pleading, she’d run off to arrange a dinner between the schoolmaster’s family and their own. He’d decided that he would run away, or maybe bury himself in the garden. She’d returned victorious, and had informed him coyly that Luciano himself seemed the most eager of all to agree.

Of course, the Faerghans had come before they’d managed to break bread together. Luciano is gone. So is Dedue, or at least that version of himself. All of it had been too easy, he knows now. Love does not come kindly. Now it tears at him with bloodied hands and wild eyes. Will a queen know how to soothe him? Will she be a lighthouse when the tempest comes?

The nighttime monastery has no answers for him. Dedue leans against the open sill of an old, empty window. It isn’t fair for him to think like this. He loves Dimitri, and not in the simple, carefree way that he’d loved Luciano. Above all other things, he desires that the prince live well. Fodlan is cruel. Is it nothing like Duscur, which had never been a friend to war. Dimitri has already paid the blood price to live a Fodlani life, and to terrible excess. If a queen will soothe him, he wishes only that she find herself at his side as quickly as possible. Better even if in that very moment she spins in his arms, her gentle smile captivating, eclipsing the dark tar of everything that haunts him.

And if Dedue suffers for it, so be it. Suffering is what Fodlan has brought him. It has taken everything else. He’s learned how to endure it. Soon it will be no different from the thorny roses growing in the greenhouse, once strange and wicked to him, but now better for his care after his hands had calloused.

“Dedue!”

He turns too late, cursing himself for having become so deeply lost in his own thoughts that he hadn’t heard footsteps on the stairs. Dimitri is there, like a ghost conjured from his sulking, handsome in his regalia and pink-cheeked from the ballroom’s cheer.

“I feared that I would never find you,” he laughs, jogging forward. Dedue is shocked to smell wine on him— even more to see it in the lingering flush on his cheeks, and in the way he totters slightly as he comes to meet him at his side. “You have done well to hide yourself, although it seems you have neglected your duties elsewhere.”

A jab of guilt mixes with frustration in his stomach. He can tolerate orders, but not when they tug him apart. “Your Highness?” he manages.

“I did not mean for you to abandon the ball entirely,” Dimitri reveals, laughing again. Dedue understands in that moment that his giddiness is not simply from, no doubt, being overly gracious in accepting toasts throughout the night. This is his life. Not the one that has been forced ruthlessly upon him, but the way that things once were. Dances, toasts, music, revelry. It is his father, in the same way that the pinging smithy in the monastery market is Dedue’s own. He is happy.

“I do not suspect that I was missed,” Dedue answers finally.

“Nonsense,” Dimitri puffs, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the sill as Dedue had done before. His face in profile is perfect. He can imagine it stamped onto silver coins. There is no question, not even here in the midst of the ruins, of what he is, or what sort of man he will one day become. Dedue finds it difficult to look at him without being stunned dumb.

“I have looked for you for the better part of an hour,” the prince continues with a self conscious smile.

“An hour?” Dedue echoes, incredulous. He must be goggling at him, because Dimitri laughs again.

“Do you really mean to chastise me as well? I have already been thoroughly scolded by Sylvain, if you must know. I had thought to endure it, that is to say, but a man can only dance so many waltzes.”

“You danced them well,” Dedue contends. Dimitri dips his head.

“Did you think so? I am afraid I made a mess of it by trodding on Hilda’s toes. Twice.”

Dedue winces despite himself. Dimitri bends over the sill with laughter at the sight. It makes Dedue feel warm, as if he’d just spent that lost hour in the sauna.

“Well,” he struggles, finding himself unusually ill-footed, “you shall always find yourself the better dancer in my company.”

“Do you not enjoy it? Dancing?” Dimitri cocks his head with his question. His hair falls across his eyes. He looks so young and vibrant— _alive_. Dedue is astounded that he can possibly be the same creature who he has so often found cowered in dark corners, shivering and raving. Now, more than ever, he sees what has been stolen from him. A strange slush of anger and wanting fills him.

“Not really,” he manages. Dimitri looks at him so earnestly he can’t help but explain himself further. “I do like the music.”

“Do you?” Dimitri beams. “Did you have a favorite?”

“I do not know the names,” Dedue admits, confounded once more by what, exactly, Dimitri wants from him.

“That’s alright,” Dimitri soldiers on. “It was the usual company. Not that there is anything wrong with the classics,” he adds with a wink. He holds Dedue’s gaze for a moment before looking away. His smile turns suddenly serious with concentration. Dedue realizes that he is humming. He listens, and quickly recognizes the first song that’d opened the night. His mimicry is impressive. Dedue feels himself smile. Emboldened, Dimitri smiles as well, lifting a finger to conduct himself with a swooshing wave.

“What about that one?” he asks after the next stanza. “Was it your favorite?”

Dedue shakes his head.

“Mine neither,” Dimitri admits. He grins and begins to hum the second song from the night. This one is a little trickier. He closes his eyes to concentrate. His lashes are dark against his skin. His ruddy cheeks suit him.

“Not that one?” Dimitri guesses. Dedue feels a simple pleasure at his having guessed right.

“Nor that one,” he agrees.

“Ah, then certainly the next,” Dimitri offers sagely. He begins to hum the third song. It’d been a slower waltz than the two before. Dedue feels the same ache in his chest from Dimitri’s humming that the cellos and violas had first spurred to life. There is a richness to the song that had been absent in its peers— a sadness, even. He closes his eyes. The looping, circuitous melody dances inside his skin. When was the last time that he’d listened to music?

Dimitri hums every measure. Dedue realizes too late that he’s been standing like a fool with closed eyes for far too long. He opens them and finds Dimitri closer than he’d been last. He can see the flecks of sapphire in his eyes.

“That is my favorite as well,” Dimitri admits. His voice is quiet. Dedue can feel the heat of it on his skin. “I found my mind wandering while I danced it. It was difficult...” he starts, then stops, his gaze flickering to his feet before bouncing upwards again. “Sometimes I find it difficult to be honest.”

Dedue’s heartbeat is thick and sluggish in his chest. He can hear it drumming. “How do you mean?”

“I... I don’t know. You see the masks I wear, Dedue. You’ve made them for me. They are a shield. I know this. I am grateful for them, and yet... Sometimes I wish to be free of them. Not to force myself into a waltz with a partner I have not sought out, to dance a step that seems so tawdry, not when I listen to music like that. I wish... to do as I wish.” He smiles bashfully. “I suppose that is a foolish thing to say.”

“It is your prerogative,” Dedue argues with the shake of his head. He feels numbed by the moment, as if it is something tremendous, although he hasn’t yet caught on as to why. “You are a prince.”

“So I am,” he sighs, “and so I can only ask for your forgiveness.”

Dimitri tips forward. The moonlight turns gold, blue, silver. Suddenly his lips are pressed to Dedue’s own. A fever leaps into Dedue’s body, freezing him in place. Dimitri tilts back against his stillness. Dedue has learned to read him well. He sees guilt swirled in his uplifted gaze, and disappointment so divine that it dizzies him. He leans forward to kiss him back. It is a damnable thing.

He wants it. Dimitri sighs into him and opens his mouth. Dedue pulls him closer, feeling over the rich embroidery of his jacket to seek out the nape of his neck and the narrowed base of his spine. It is inelegant— desperate— full of teeth. Dedue has never kissed anyone in such a way before. He pulls away before he loses himself in the slick heat of it entirely.

“I...” Dimitri begins breathlessly. His lips are the same pink-bitten shade as the apples of his cheeks. His fingers, still splayed across Dedue’s chest, trace the round of one of his buttons before they pull away. “I am glad, Dedue.”

Dedue nods. He dares not say anything else. Dimitri falters slightly before he steps a gap between them and begins to backpedal towards the stairs.

“Goodnight,” he says, perhaps as desperate as Dedue not to shatter this moment they’ve built between them.

“Goodnight, Your Highness,” Dedue answers. Dimitri lingers for a moment longer before he turns and strides through the door. Dedue listens to his footsteps as he descends. Afterwards he watches as he weaves his way back to the monastery like a golden meteor glimmering in the velvety night. All the while Dedue presses his fingers to his lips. Once he moves the moment will be lost, transformed into another. But if he stands and lingers, perhaps it will last for just another moment longer. He traces the memory of Dimitri’s mouth. In it he finds, long lost and feared forgotten, the shape of an honest smile.


End file.
